


There Is No Salvation

by Sarai



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Blasphemy, Gen, it's quiet angst, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26218612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarai/pseuds/Sarai
Summary: While looking for leads on Quynh's whereabouts, Nicky offers reassurance. Andy would prefer he didn't.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Kudos: 34





	There Is No Salvation

Nicolo moves away from Yusuf carefully. He calls himself Joseph in this New World, the one that has been here all along, but Yusuf is the name Nicolo whispers against his skin. He is Joseph as much as this world is new. The land is old and Yusuf is sleeping, and Nicolo leaves him in his peace. The morning cold makes him shiver.

Their things are packed, for the most part. A fire dances a merry, desperate carola amid the morning damp. Andromache watches it. Her fingers wrap around the handle of her axe. It makes them a spectacle in the towns and Andromache will disguise it, put it in a case and call it an Italian lute—these are not people who know the shape of Italian lutes. (The same as any lute, very different from a labrys.) But she never goes without it.

If she’d had it, she told him once, they never would have taken Quynh.

He sits on the other side of the fire, reaches out to warm his fingers. Wisps of fog steal through the cedars and something—a waxwing? He only catches a glimpse…—flaps its swift way into the morning.

“God has a reason.”

Nicolo knows how Andromache feels about faith. She told them once that she knew Yeshua and that _your book gets a few things wrong, Nicolo_. She said it with a smile he hasn’t seen in decades, a flash of teeth and a light in her eyes, teasing. For his own peace of mind, he never asked if she truly meant it.

He respects others’ faiths, or absences of faith.

There was a time he did not, a time that will always weigh heavily on his soul. Now he knows better. Though he sees faith with more perspective, he also sees his friend. Andromache stops because Nicolo tells her to stop. In a private moment, Yusuf encourages Nicolo to let her rage. He can't. She has been for years in a way he would have once called possessed and he will not, for several centuries more, know to call manic. All he knows to call it now is hurting.

Andromache raises her head. Something in her eyes coils and strikes as she looks at him. The tightened grip on her axe would be a threat to anyone else. Even if he were the type to be cruel—which he is not—he could never be cruel to her. Andromache, Quynh, and Yusuf are his family. But he knows cruelty. She heard it although he never meant it, and she returns it even before opening her mouth.

“They said the same. Your God had brought us to them to find salvation.”

Nicolo lowers his eyes. He hears her pain, but even more than he understands Andromache, he understands the men who hurt her. He has been those men. When his heart was slain to save his soul it was Nicolo who wielded the blade—though he did not know then that Yusuf was his heart.

“Theirs was a holy mission.”

As his had been.

“Fuck your God, Nicolo.”

The words hit like arrows. (He would know.) But he doesn’t blame Andromache. Nicolo nods, accepting, because it’s not an attack. It feels like penance.

He doesn’t want to tell her it’s hurtful. She knows that. Her anger is justified.

Instead, he says, “I’ll wake Yusuf. We can be in Jersey by this afternoon.”

They have been searching for years. For decades, tracking by the ship’s manifest. Neither Nicolo nor Yusuf asked how she got it. When one saw Andromache the Scythian clutching a folded sheet of paper and splashed with blood, one knew enough. Since that day, Andromache keeps the manifest closer than anything but her axe or her pain as she travels the length and breadth of the Colonies. She hunts down each man who traveled on that ship, sailors and passengers alike.   
  
It won’t be many years more before the last lead dies—literally, the man dies. Smallpox. It won’t be long after his death that they realize none of the next generation will be of use.

_Did your father tell you…_

Only one knows anything, a tale about a witch at the bottom of the sea. He lives deep in Pennsylvania, close to the reserve, as far as he can get within the Colonies from the water and its soggy witch.

It won’t be many years before she cuts her hair and tells them her name is Andy now.

It will be many years before Nicolo sees past the hate and the anger in her eyes and realizes Andromache has been doing penance of her own.

It will be many years more—many, many years more—before Andromache comes into the kitchen while Nicky is attempting to cook. Except that he wants to use raisins and Andy keeps eating the raisins. The hum of electric lights and heavy shadows set the scene for a mystery. Andy is a mystery, but the disappearance of his raisins is not. 

“There’s no good excuse, Nicky. You looked like them and you sounded like them. I hated you for it.”

That hurts.

Nicky wipes his hands on the rag he uses for a dish towel and steps away from the counter. It hurts him to hear that Andromache hated him.

“Quynh,” he says, surmising—accurately—what she means.

“They used faith as an excuse to do whatever monstrous thing they wanted. What I kept hearing from you was, _I believe in God and I am allowed to hurt you because of it_. You didn’t mean that and I shouldn’t have said what I said to you in New Jersey.”

Nicky has never before died of a heart attack. This might be the first time. But first he shares a long, quiet hug with his oldest friend.


End file.
